Tag Archives: crowdsourcing

Sara Cambridge is an interaction designer and a frequent contributor to the Quantified Self community. This past spring she was tasked with creating a unique information visualization as part of her graduate coursework at the UC Berkeley iSchool. Given her interest in QS she chose to use her experience with tracking her diet using the Eatery mobile app as the basis for her visualization project. Using the Eatery led her down an interesting path that helped her understand her own eating habits, how she compares to others, and how people “really” rate other’s dietary choice. (Filmed at the Bay Area QS Meetup)

Jessica Charlesworth’s blog has a fantastic title: The Future of Self-Knowledge. Jessica is a designer and researcher based in London, England. She has developed several interesting tools for taking a somewhat quantified, analog peek into your future.

Crowdsourcing Your Future is a postcard that you send to your friends to have them predict your preferable and probable future timelines, so you can take action to follow or avoid certain futures that your friends see for you.

Personal Microtrends is a daily diary that asks provocative questions and suggests behavior changes for the next day to continue or alter trends depending on your goals. Jessica says,

What if you could create a self-reflective diary that made use of
our everyday thoughts to provoke us in such a way that you were able to
change your future actions?

The Microtrend Diary
is a mirror of your daily actions and emotions that reveals provocative
ways to alter your future actions.

This personalised diary is printed to order based on a set
of preliminary personality questions. As the owner makes a daily record
of their actions, a unique set of provocative aide memoirs are revealed
under a perforated flap that suggest changing your behaviour in certain
ways for the following day.

Right now Jessica’s diary is just at the concept stage, but the idea of looking at microtrends in your daily life, based on whatever data you collect, could allow self-quantifiers to spot patterns and make any needed changes on a more granular basis. It’s like rapid prototyping for self-experimentation.

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